Among trans folks of all genders, it’s fairly common to feel a way about your voice. Even with HRT, folks might express discomfort or distaste with the way their voice doesn’t conform to the cisgender standard, something commonly known as voice dysphoria.
There are ways to work around it of course, voice training being a popular way to work your voice into a higher or lower register so that the dysphoria lessens. And sometimes it’s not even about dysphoria: it’s about basic safety. A voice that cis people deem as somehow not “matching” your gender can lead to trouble and—in a country becoming increasingly inhospitable to trans existence—outright violence.
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“You never needed permission. Just let yourself happen,” she said to her past self, bridging the gap across four years of transitioning.
So yes, voice dysmorphia is very real and very common. But there’s a lot of nuance to the topic that doesn’t always get its due.
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Thankfully, we have a strong, proud tradition of Discourse in this community, and the discourse surrounding voice dysphoria is particularly interesting.
Consider the filmmaker and fantastic tweeter Mia Moore, who recently made an incisive point about voice dysphoria using the ultimate tgirl icon, Jessica Rabbit.
For those not in the know (somehow), Jessica Rabbit, the iconic femme fatale of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, is one of the great sex symbols of the modern era. A little bit of Veronica Lake, a little bit of Marlene Dietrich, and a whole lot of Rita Hayworth, she’s everything you could want in a cartoon woman based on 1940s glamour gals. She’s also voiced by the sultry-voiced Kathleen Turner, another iconic femme fatale of the 80s neo-noir scene.
What Moore points out is important: yes, it’s important to feel comfortable with your voice. But let’s also remember that femininity is a spectrum, and plenty of cis women have voices in a lower register, or voices that don’t read as stereotypically feminine. That doesn’t make them any less sexy, or any less womanly. So why do we hold trans girls to such a strict standard?
Basically, there’s no such thing as a masculine or feminine voice, and if we lived in a less transphobic world, maybe we’d be more attuned to and accepting of that fact. Even if the world we’re living in sucks and is 100% total hell, we can always dream of a better one.
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